Sound for Digital Video

Tomlinson Holman, Arthur Baum

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135957094
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Achieve professional quality sound on a limited budget! Harness all new, Hollywood style audio techniques to bring your independent film and video productions to the next level.

In Sound for Digital Video, Second Edition industry experts Tomlinson Holman and Arthur Baum give you the tools and knowledge to apply recent advances in audio capture, video recording, editing workflow, and mixing to your own film or video with stunning results. This fresh edition is chockfull of techniques, tricks, and workflow secrets that you can apply to your own projects from preproduction through postproduction.

New to this edition:

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• A new feature on "true" 24p shooting and editing systems, as well as single vs. double-system recording

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• A strong focus on new media, including mini-DVDs, hard disks, memory cards, and standard and high-definition imagery

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• Discussion of camera selection, manual level control, camera and recorder inputs, location scouting, and preproduction planning

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• Instruction in connectors, real-time transfers, and file-based transfers from DVDs, hard drives, and solid state media.

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• Blu-Ray and HD tape formats for mastering and distribution in addition to file-based, DV, and DVD masters.

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• A revamped companion website, www.focalpress.com/cw/holman, featuring recording and editing exercises, examples and sample tracks

Whether you are an amateur filmmaker who wants to create great sound or an advanced professional in need of a reference guide, Sound for Digital Video, Second Edition is an essential addition to your digital audio tool belt.

Chapter 1

Basic Concepts

Attend a shooting of Will and Grace , watch one of the most accomplished directors in the world while the cameras are rolling, and you might ask the question: Where is he looking? James Burrows (Mary Tyler Moore, Cheers, and many more) is staring at the ceiling. He could be looking at the actors, but their routines have been blocked out days ahead, and they are highly accomplished. He could be looking at the monitors to see if the four cameras are covering the action as planned, but he has a fully professional crew and has been through camera rehearsals, so he knows they’ll get it right. Why is he looking at the ceiling? Because he’s listening to the delivery of the lines, the ultimate consideration of getting the show on film, constantly asking “is it funny?” The sound of the show is its bottom line. The question a sound person doesn’t want to hear from such a director is “why is that distorted?” or “noisy?” or “reverberant?” This book explains how at each juncture— recording, editing, mixing, and mastering—mistakes can be avoided, sound quality improved, and sound design fit to the story.

It doesn’t take a Hollywood studio environment to produce programs today. In fact, more and more people are turning to inexpensive digital video technology to create professional quality content. New advances have put high-definition video and audio within reach for amateurs and low-budget filmmakers alike, bringing cheaper and better methods for storytelling to a wider pool of people than ever before, and new distribution platforms such as Internet video have further democratized the media. But even with all these advances in digital video production and distribution, knowing how to use the technology effectively remains just as important as having access to it. In a landscape where anyone can make programs that stimulate, amuse, inform, frighten, and do virtually all of the things that cinema and television have been doing for more than one hundred years, what most often separates amateur efforts from professional looking (and sounding) programs is the filmmakers’ attention to aesthetic detail—especially the quality of the sound.

Technologically, we have the capability to do more with video and audio today than at any point in the history of motion pictures. The digital video revolution has given rise to cameras and camcorders with greater image resolution and cleaner sound reproduction than that of older analog formats. Moreover, digital recordings can be transferred with no generation loss into picture and sound editing systems, edited, mixed, and exported back to tape or disc, all while preserving the fidelity and clarity of the original recordings. This is important because older analog methods suffered from generation loss and required extensive off-line/online facilities for editing professional programs. While consumer analog video formats were fine for home video use, copying and editing analog video inevitably led to imperfections in the final product.

Analog copies are like those from copy machines: if you copy an original, then copy that copy, and so forth, the picture will get fuzzier and have more contrast than the original after several generations as slight differences in each copy build up and become noticeable. On the other hand, digital recordings ingested into an editing system are copied bit-for-bit so that each copy is an exact clone of the camera original. The same is true of transfer between editing and mixing systems and back to tape or disc for archival purposes and distribution. The fact that each copy is a literal clone means the work throughout the process is more visually and audibly true to the original than ever before, with the potential for truly lossless transfers along the entire path from the captured expression of an actor or documentary subject to the performance seen and heard by an audience. Of course, digital editing systems also offer the possibility of processing and modifying recordings in creative ways to produce a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Once modified or created digitally, new files are also copied faithfully with no further generation loss throughout the finishing process. Your objective may not always be to make perfect clones of the original recordings, but digital recording and transfer still offer the most transparent route from production through postproduction, and it is important to know that the system is transparent when it needs to be.

Unfortunately, a common misperception among producers is “now that it’s digital, we don’t need any postproduction, right?” The truth is that limitations on the quality of production sound recordings are caused by practical considerations such as noise on the set more commonly than the actual technical limitations of the medium. Furthermore, editing a scene together from several shots means that voices recorded differently from shot to shot have to be blended together smoothly in postproduction, making them sound as though they come from one continuous recording so that technical matters do not distract the listener. So even today there is plenty of work in postproduction, both to improve on the original production sound recordings and to add effects, music, and the like to create a compelling professional soundtrack.

Although digital video affords filmmakers a new level of quality and simplicity of use today, the main item hindering better sound design and sound quality is, frankly, most often the training and experience of those doing the job, including not just sound-specific people but everyone involved in the task. Viewing art house films, produced on video with small budgets but with great passion, reveals this to be true. Almost all of them have a carefully controlled look, formed by the synergy that occurs among location selection, production design, costume design, makeup, lighting, and cinematography, because everyone is aware, more or less, that these visual elements are important in telling stories on film or video. However, the sound quality of independent films varies tremendously because not everyone thinks about sound in the same way they carefully plan and control the visuals. Since sound is “invisible,” it’s harder to “see” the impact of good sound during production and editing, and too often even the sound design created in postproduction is not properly fit to the story. The purpose of this book is to inform users of the potential for good sound to improve motion picture storytelling, whether fiction or nonfiction, and to give filmmakers the tools and information they need to better utilize the storytelling medium in its full expressive capacity. Two famous filmmakers agree: sound is very important. George Lucas and Michael Moore represent a considerable range of filmmaking styles, yet each director insists that sound is vital to the overall motion picture experience.

The range of productions covered by this book is from simple one-person shooting situations (generally using cameras meeting certain minimum audio requirements) up through independent video productions shot for feature film release with larger crews. Included along the way will be tips that are useful for industrial and commercial information videos, webisodes, video blogs, meeting videos, event videos such as wedding videos, documentaries, and scripted videos designed for both film and television release and for distribution via the Internet and mobile platforms. Note that the techniques given here, and inherent in the medium, are neutral with respect to their use, in a political and ethical sense. They could have been used to great effect by Leni Riefenstahl, had she had them, to fawningly document Hitler’s rise, just as they can be used to improve the storytelling and emotive power of the best documentaries and fiction films today. Technique is always only a means to an end.

Digital Video Landscape

The digital video landscape has grown tremendously in the past decade with the proliferation of high-definition video formats and camcorders, alongside increased consumer interest in the video capabilities of digital devices such as phones, tablets, and traditional still image cameras. Whereas ten years ago “digital video” was nearly synonymous with DV tape formats, today newer file-based systems and video compression formats have taken over much of the market. One consequence of the proliferation of formats is increased complexity in ensuring the interoperability of editing systems and interchangeability of recordings made on different devices. For the most part, mobile devices such as phones and tablets have filled the gap left by analog video and older consumer DV formats in the “home video” market for quick and easy capturing and sharing of video with friends and relatives. More professional projects demand higher quality video shot on digital camcorders or, increasingly, the motion picture recording modes of high-end digital SLRs.

Still, the range of features and formats spanned by purpose-built digital video cameras today is staggering. The simplest camcorders have a built-in zoom lens and a single CMOS or CCD image sensor delivering resolution (or sharpness) and a range of color that is less than that of a good conventional video monitor. More expensive digital video cameras may have lens mounts allowing lenses of different focal lengths to be used, and may have one or three high-resolution image sensors delivering much greater sharpness and color fidelity than low-end models. Digital single-lens reflex (SLR) cameras offering high-definition video modes became popular for shooting beginning with the introduction of the Canon 5D Mark II to the market in late 2008. One advantage of shooting on DSLRs is the capability to interchange lenses, using the same high-quality lenses designed for professional still image shooting. Still higher-end digital video cameras may even utilize 35 mm cinema lenses via their standard lens mounts or adapters, and may use larger image sensors to achieve shallow depth of field and more closely approach the look of shooting on film.

Early digital video cameras, both standard-definition and high-definition models, shot on tape, recording digital video and audio streams to 1/4” or larger magnetic tape instead of the older analog signals recorded by conventional tape decks and camcorders. As the field of digital video has grown, both in original production via digital camcorders and in digital distribution of motion pictures via DVD and Blu-ray, new recording media such as hard drives, optical discs, and flash memory cards have caught up and overtaken tape-based workflows in many sectors of the market. Still, both consumer and prosumer digital video cameras today may use tape-based or file-based recording, or even offer both methods of recording on the same camera. Cameras that record to tape may work with multiple tape formats, including consumer-based and more professional format cassettes, and may have the option of recording different video formats depending on which type of cassette is loaded in them. Cameras offering recording on flash memory devices, such as P2, SxS, SDHC, or even Compact Flash cards, typically offer a range of video bit rates and resolutions as well, and may record in one or more video formats; DV, MPEG-2, and MPEG-4 codecs including AVC/H.264 are common on cameras available today, and new codecs such as HEVC are expected to be forthcoming, and new codecs such as HEVC are expected to be forthcoming. So the range of options in selecting a digital video camera is wide, and a particular camera may itself have a wide range of options such as recording medium, format, and lens choice that must be tailored to the needs of a production.

Across the spectrum of digital video cameras in use today, there is also a range of audio recording capabilities represented, but the capability of a camera to record useable audio for a given production may generally be gauged by looking at a few specific features and specifications. The following minimum standards for audio dictate what is typically needed not just in terms of technical quality, but also in terms of the ability to capture sound in a practical sense, using proper microphone placement and mixing technique as discussed in the chapters on production sound in this text.

Minimum Standards for Audio

Although all camcorders record some kind of audio, just what audio they are recording is another matter altogether. ¹ Serious limitations are found for camcorders that record only from on-board microphones with no available external inputs, and for those that lack manual level controls. Lesser limitations sometimes occur even with cameras equipped for external inputs and with manual level controls in the form of the types of inputs available and their features. Finally, the audio recording format (PCM versus “lossy” formats) may dictate whether it is appropriate to use the camcorder as the primary audio recorder on a production.

If budgetary or picture considerations necessitate using a camera that doesn’t meet the minimum standards for audio discussed below, it may still be possible to record good audio using a dedicated audio recorder instead of recording audio on camera. This approach, called “double-system” since the sound and picture recording systems are separate, will be discussed in detail in Chapter 3. Although double-system recording is common in professional work, one potential drawback to such a setup is that more time and effort must be expended to sync audio and video when transferring files to an editing system, whereas “single-system” recording offers the benefit of marrying sound to picture in camera as both streams are recorded on the same medium. For that reason, single-system recording is commonly used when available on projects with a large volume of footage such as documentary films, and has traditionally been used on digital video projects of all kinds, including web-based video, because of its ease of use in postproduction.

For single-system recording, a camera should meet the minimum audio standards outlined above. First and foremost, the limitation of using ...